The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services published its 2018 MACRA
proposed rule and is accepting comments until August 21.

The Department of Health and Human
Services was scheduled to open its

Healthcare Cybersecurity Communications
Integration Center by the end of June.

More than 36 million people live in
areas with the “double-burden” of high
rates of chronic disease and low rates
of broadband connectivity, limiting
treatment through telehealth, the Federal Communications Commission reported.

An analysis by security breach prevention vendor Preempt Inspector found
that seven percent of its customers’
employees are using compromised
passwords from a previous breach
and another nearly 20 percent of
employees’ passwords can be easily
compromised.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
will soon launch a pilot third party
certification program where lower-risk
digital health products could be marketed without FDA premarket review
and higher-risk products marketed
with a streamlined FDA review.

Royal Philips’ second annual Future
Health Index showed a growing and
significant gap between healthcare professionals’ and the general population’s
perceptions of healthcare systems’
effectiveness and their actual abilities.

A study conducted by the State University of New York showed that healthcare
provider involvement with a health
information exchange significantly
lowers the repetition of therapeutic
medical procedures, while diagnostic
procedures are not impacted.

One of the nation’s largest vendors
of electronic health records software,
eClinical Works (ECW), and some of its
employees will pay a total of $155 million to resolve a False Claims Act lawsuit alleging that ECW misrepresented
the capabilities of its software, the US
Justice Department announced. ¢

sion’s network security posture and
determine whether these networks
and applications are susceptible to
hackers,” according to an article in

Health IT Security. OIG also said it
would focus on access and physical
controls, database security, and web-facing application security.

“Going forward, OIG’s planning ef-forts will consider the significant chal-lenges that exist with respect to healthIT adoption; meaningful use; and in-teroperability across providers, acrossHHS, and between providers and pa-tients,” OIG authors said.

OIG organized the 77-page report
by areas in which it is working to identify problems, abuses, deficiencies,
and remedies, offering a summary of
work it has done with HHS in each of
the areas as well as suggestions for
future improvement.

These areas are:

Enhancing safety and quality of care
Improving efficiency of program
operations

Reducing improper payments

Fostering prudent payment policies
Fighting fraud in HHS programs ¢

Precision Medicine Use Quickly Increasingin Healthcare Organizations

A new report from HIMSS Analytics states the use of precision medicine initiatives in healthcare organizations is likely to explode over the next two years,
according to an article in Becker’s Health IT and CIO Review. For the “2017 Essentials Brief: Precision Medicine Study,” HIMSS Analytics surveyed 100 medical organizations and 5,460 US hospitals about their precision medicine use.
While only 26 percent of healthcare organizations reported currently adopting
precision medicine initiatives, nearly 70 percent of organizations plan to develop precision medicine initiatives within the next 12 to 24 months, according
to the study. The larger the organization, the more likely they are to adopt precision medicine. The study found oncology (62.5 percent) and cardiology ( 50
percent) specialties are currently using precision medicine the most. ¢